


Hurts Like Hell

by idrilhadhafang



Category: Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Angst, Conflicted Kylo Ren, Kylo Ren Has Issues, M/M, POV Alternating, Past Poe Dameron/Ben Solo | Kylo Ren, Past Torture, Poe Dameron Needs A Hug, Pre-Star Wars: The Rise of Skywalker
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-17
Updated: 2019-12-17
Packaged: 2021-02-26 03:33:20
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 882
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21836773
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/idrilhadhafang/pseuds/idrilhadhafang
Summary: Without the other, who are Poe and Kylo, in the end?
Relationships: Poe Dameron/Kylo Ren
Comments: 2
Kudos: 26
Collections: Allbingo





	Hurts Like Hell

**Author's Note:**

> Prompt: I’m nothing without you
> 
> Disclaimer: I own nothing. 
> 
> Author’s Notes: Title from the song “Hurts Like Hell” by Fleurie, which someone actually put on a Darkpilot YouTube playlist. Pretty appropriate, huh?

“He looks younger than you’d expect, doesn’t he?”  
  
That’s what one of the Resistance soldiers says. New to the party, Poe can only assume. Rey and Finn don’t look surprised, of course, and General Organa...she’d know her son’s face when she saw it. So would Poe, for that matter. It’s been eleven years since Ben Solo left. Since he ran away, Poe corrects himself. For whatever reason, Ben ran away, and Poe was left alone. He can remember the confusion, even in the midst of Ben trying to offer “explanations” that somehow didn’t add up.  
  
Without Ben Solo, Poe knows that he's mostly a soldier, throwing himself into the cause without reservation. Someone not unlike his mother. Shara Bey’s heart still lives in Poe, even in its darker incarnations.  
  
“You don’t know what to expect, under the mask,” Poe says.  
  
“You don’t.” Rose Tico, meanwhile, looks at the holoscreen. “He just looks so...normal. If someone walked up to him on the street...they probably wouldn’t have guessed he was a monster.”  
  
Poe swallows, winces. Even the word “monster”...he can’t say that he’s comfortable with that idea. Ben — Kylo, he mentally corrects himself. Even now, he’s not comfortable with realizing the monster and the man are one and the same — has done horrible things. There is a part of him that can’t forgive Ben for breaking into his mind. There is a part of him that can’t forgive Ben for killing Han Solo. For hurting Finn, for hurting Rey, for killing innocent people at Tuanul. For killing Tekka.  
  
(Gods, had Kylo cared that he was hurting Poe? That he was hurting, killing so many people? Had it ever occurred to him that everything he was doing was wrong?)  
  
“Poe?” Finn’s voice jars Poe, gently, from his thoughts. “You okay?”  
  
“Yeah.” _No,_ he wants to say, but he doesn’t know, quite, how to say it. He’s still trying to understand the idea that the same man who tortured him was the same man who looked at him once like he was a blinding, radiant sun. Who confided in him ideas of not being good enough, of being a bad Jedi. Who listened to his stories about what he saw in the New Republic Navy and loved him all the same. Who told him to keep protecting others before he left — had he even predicted, then, that he would fall? That he would become everything he hated?  
  
_I thought we could be together, Ben. I thought we could love each other, start a family...and we can’t._  
  
The screen flicks through other images, of course. Images of the Knights of Ren, not unmasked, so Poe can only imagine who’s under the masks. Who survived the massacre at the Academy, and who didn’t. What was left of them, for that matter. But in his mind, what seems to be carved into his memory is Ben’s face, bearing the odd faded scar that Rey gave him, and without him...  
  
Without him, Poe is lost. He knows what he has to do. He just wonders if he has the strength to do it when the time comes.  
  
***  
  
Hux is talking. All but screeching, Kylo thinks, even as he lists off the Resistance members who need to be destroyed. Kylo can agree, even as he watches the presentation General Hux is giving the new recruits (not stormtroopers, just regular cadets. Besides, Kylo doubts he’s bringing the stormtrooper program back. He doubts that it would do anything but produce more FN-2187s, and besides, there’s something in him that finds it, along with other things Hux has done — like Starkiller — distasteful) that FN-2187 and the scavenger need to be stopped. But Poe...  
  
It’s been eleven years. One of those years, he hurt Poe. Kylo’s found ways to justify his actions over the years, but this (along with killing Han Solo, and some others he’s not ready to acknowledge yet) he can’t justify. He can’t justify Poe’s screams that seem to ring in his ears even a year later. He can’t justify Poe’s tears. He doesn’t know if he can justify the fact that Snoke had far from subtly implied that all this, all of it, was a test. _All life is a test, young Solo. Is this any different?_  
  
Kylo sits, rigidly still, overseeing Hux’s lesson. And when the cadets salute, almost mechanically, that same straight-armed salute that’s become a signature of the First Order, there is something in him that can’t help but wonder if that’s the galaxy he’s gifting for a beautiful, brilliant star named Poe.  
  
_Why wouldn’t it be?_ He’s doing everything that the Republic and Snoke could never do. Snoke had made promises, but they were sweet-tasting lies. Same with the Republic. People died. So, Kylo thinks even as his heart races, people die in war.  
  
_The galaxy I’m gifting you, Poe...is it enough? Is it good enough for you?_  
  
Eventually, Hux’s lesson ends, and Poe’s face is engraved in Kylo’s memories. Without Poe, Kylo knows that he is a shell of a being. He curtly dismisses Hux, takes note of the venom under seemingly polite words, and he knows in the back of his mind that without Poe, Kylo Ren, formerly Ben Solo, is nothing.  
  
Maybe that’s one of the worst parts.


End file.
